This update is provided by the Office of Information Technology for students, faculty and staff using Blackboard at UMBC. If you have questions or suggestions, contact John Fritz (fritz@umbc.edu or 410.455.6596). For more information about using Blackboard, visit http://blackboard.umbc.edu or send email to blackboard@umbc.edu.

SUMMARY

1. Reminder: End of Semester Checklist
2. Spring 2006 Courses Expire on 6/15
3. Summer 2006 Course Shells Created on 5/18
4. Digital Drop Box to be Discontinued on 6/30
5. OIT Seeks Faculty Volunteers for Bb Version 7.1 Summer Pilot
6. Alternate Delivery Program Winter 2007 RFPs (deadline 5/19)
7. Wimba Tools Pilot Extended One Year; Live Classroom Ends December 2006s
8. Growth of Blackboard Research Communities
9. Bb Courses Older than One Year to be Archived this Summer
10. FYI: Goucher Technology Conference

As we near the end of the semester, here's a checklist of tasks instructors may want to keep in mind (help sheets are available on the Blackboard Help tab):

Make your course unavailable to students
Create a backup copy of your course (and gradebook)
Send UMBC Blackboard course deletion requests

While past courses are available online in Blackboard, OIT recommends creating a backup copy, too. It's also smart to make your course unavailable to students after the semester ends, so it doesn't show up in their list of courses in future semesters--a big complaint of students. Exceptions might include keeping the course open to process incompletes, or as a courtesy to students who request to have ongoing access.

If you have created a backup copy of your course (online or on your own computer) consider having all older versions of the course deleted. You can then create your future course from your backup or the most recent version online. This way, you always "copy forward" the most recent version, and can get rid of past versions that are just taking up space--and probably still appear in past students' course lists. To permanently remove the course from your list, use the online form on the Blackboard Help tab. When the request has been received, we will send you an email to confirm your request.

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As announced earlier in the semester, Spring 2006 auto-created Bb course "shells" are set to expire on June 15, 2006 after grades are due. This means the course will automatically revert to being unavailable to students, but faculty will still see the course link. This will help students who frequently complain about having numerous links to old courses in Blackboard. They can request ongoing access from the instructor, who can override the duration settings manually. This may be helpful for processing incompletes, but the majority of students will not have to request to be un-enrolled from old courses.

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On May 18, 2006, OIT will create an empty Blackboard course shell for all summer 2006 courses listed in the UMBC Schedule of Classes with assigned instructors. Courses that don’t have assigned instructors will be created as courses are added to the Schedule of Classes by the Registrar’s office. Students will be automatically enrolled in all Bb courses as has been done in the past.

Any faculty member who wants to use Blackboard simply needs to login via myUMBC or http://blackboard.umbc.edu and follow the instructions on the Blackboard Help Tab. If you do not wish to use Blackboard, do nothing. By default, all UMBC Blackboard course "shells" remain unavailable to students until the instructor of record makes his or her course available. Starting this semester, we will also turn off the student “self enrollment” feature in all new Blackboard shells. This can be turned back on by instructors if so desired. Please Note that self enrolling in a Blackboard course does not constitute official registration in a UMBC course.

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As OIT announced on February 10, 2006, and November 28, 2005, the Assignments feature in Blackboard is a tool that was designed to replace the Digital Drop Box by allowing the instructor to create individual assignments for each student submission, rather than have all of the submissions for the course submitted into one place. This allows for easier document management—no more need to delete Digital Drop Box files one at a time—and no more confusion by students about whether they've POSTED an assignment to their drop box, or SUBMITTED it to the instructor's drop box. The Assignment function even creates a column in the Gradebook for easier management of grades.

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OIT has installed the latest version of Blackboard (version 7.1) and is looking for faculty volunteers to pilot this system. New features in this version include the following:

1. Expanded Discussion Boards including subscriptions, grading and forum moderation
2. Assessments allowing multiple attempts can be viewed all at once

As in past UMBC Bb pilot programs, faculty who want to use the most recent version should consider the following:

• OIT will place an announcement in your pilot course describing what you and your students need to do if you encounter a problem in the version 7.1 pilot environment. We would ask you to make this a “permanent” announcement in your course throughout the semester.

• Throughout the semester, you and your students may be asked to complete a survey about your experience with the software.

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The Office of Summer, Winter and Special Programs (OSWSP) is sponsoring a program to increase the number of alternate delivery courses - specifically, hybrid and online courses - offered during special sessions (winter and summer terms) in 2007.

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The Wimba “Voice Tools” will continue to be available for use in Blackboard. The “Live Classroom” pilot, however, will be discontinued in December 2006.

If you have any questions or concerns, please contact John Fritz (fritz@umbc.edu or 5-6596) or Bob Armstrong (rarmstro@umbc.edu or 5-3885), or send email to blackboard@umbc.edu.

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Blackboard communities have traditionally been used as communication and document storage tools for campus organizations and departments, as well as being a convenient venue for campus elections and surveys. Over the last year or so communities have also become an easy to manage place to post research materials and serve as communication hubs for those involved in campus research. Examples of very successful research communities include the Lameness Project managed by Uri Tasch, professor, Mechanical Engineering and the Ecological Research Lab which is managed by Chris Swan, assistant professor, GES.

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Currently, we have over 8,000 courses and 270 communities that are stored on the Blackboard production server. Most of those courses are older then one year, and many date back as far as Fall 2000. As a result of this growth, during the summer, OIT will be archiving all courses older then one year. The courses will be placed on a seperate server and gradually removed from the production server. Doing this will accomplish several things:

1. It will reduce the load on the production server and could improve performance during peak use times.

2. It will reduce the number of courses that appear on the "myBlackboard" tab of students, and faculty.

3. It will reduce the amount of time it takes OIT to complete a course backup. Again helping to reduce stress on the system cpu and overall system performance.

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Like to see what other universities are doing with technology and teaching? Visit the Goucher College CTLT Annual Conference on May 15th. The theme for the conference is “Group Dynamics and Collaborative Learning” and will focus on group dynamics and collaborative learning.

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